by Justin Lloyd
Soon after shooting on “Hillbillies” started, Jim also traveled to Florida to film scenes for “Wilder Napalm.” Although they barely shared any screentime, Jim and M. Emmet Walsh were reunited after nearly three decades following their appearance in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the University of Kentucky. Even though Jim’s role in “Wilder Napalm” was small, working on another film with such established actors was a promising sign toward breaking away from Ernest. Even so, he remained committed to the character, now running for 13 years. Along with “Wilder Napalm,” Jim shot two Ernest movies around the same time.
At some point after the release of “Scared Stupid,” the fourth Ernest movie, John Cherry and Disney ended their relationship. A couple of years earlier, things were going so well that Cherry had told a reporter he expected at least four more pictures would be made. Cherry didn’t give specifics on what had brought about the end of the partnership other than saying, “They had some problems with me and I had some problems with them, but that’s what happens in a marriage. It was a good experience.” Cherry’s production company, Emshell Producers Group, financed the remaining Ernest movies.
The next two films, “Ernest Rides Again” and “Ernest Goes to School,” took Cherry’s film crew thousands of miles beyond their home base of Nashville to the Canadian city of Vancouver in British Columbia. The favorable Canadian exchange rate helped keep the budget low. Vancouver actually served as the location for simultaneous movie shoots. Pre-production took place on “School” while “Rides Again” was shooting. This enabled Cherry to limit the time between the successive shootings of the movies to a mere week.
Originally titled “Ernest Goes Boom,” “Rides Again” finds Ernest working as a janitor at a small college. Ernest’s professor friend, Dr. Abner Melon, is a Vern-type character the audience actually sees. The plot revolves around Ernest uncovering a Revolutionary War cannon and finding jewels inside it that Dr. Melon believes to be crown jewels from the Tower of London. Ernest eludes the bad guys for most of the movie while being chased along the countryside sitting atop the cannon. Jim thought the chase theme of the film would give children the kind of action they enjoyed from the Indiana Jones movies. He spent the better part of a month riding on top of that cannon. What made it worse was the cold weather in Vancouver, even in July.
The plot of the next movie, “Ernest Goes to School,” is similar to the 1968 film “Charly” starring Cliff Robertson. Ernest plays a high school janitor with a low IQ who suddenly becomes brilliant after taking an experimental drug. It is the only Ernest movie that Cherry did not direct; writer/producer Coke Sams took the reins on this production. The movie was the first to be released straight to video.
The movie is notable for being one of actor Sarah Chalke’s first feature-film roles. The actress was a familiar face by the time “School” went to video after she replaced the actress playing Becky, the oldest daughter on the hit show, “Roseanne,” in the fall of 1993. Years later, Chalke starred on another hit TV comedy, playing Dr. Elliott Reid in “Scrubs.”
Always looking for new ways to connect kids to Ernest, Carden & Cherry’s Emshell Producers Group teamed up with a home-video company to create an educational video called “Brain Drain Challenge” to promote “Rides Again.” The game was comprised of questions related to scenes in the film. Jim managed to make a few appearances at schools to demonstrate the game. He had students in stitches as he answered questions sounding more like one of the snobbish characters in his arsenal, Aster Clement, than the lowbrow Ernest.
“Ernest Rides Again” hit theaters just a few weeks after the release of “Hillbillies” on November 12, 1993. It was the last theatrical release of an Ernest film. With an estimated budget of $7 million and a box-office take of less than $2 million, it was apparent that life without Disney made the now-aging franchise a tough sell.
No matter how successful Jim may have been at making audiences forget about Ernest when playing Jed Clampett, “Rides Again” was an instant reminder of his alter ego. Getting the part in “Hillbillies” was a step forward, but continuing to play Ernest was two steps back from the broader career Jim always claimed he wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: SLINKY DOG
In 1991, Pixar signed a three-picture movie deal with Disney. The company had morphed over many years from a computer hardware company to one now focused on animation. Pixar’s Academy Award-winning animated shorts were so impressive and cutting-edge that it seemed inevitable a major motion picture would someday feature their exciting new animation process. In addition to shorts, Pixar had also found some success producing animated commercials for companies such as Tropicana and Life Savers.
The first feature-length movie that Pixar made was “Toy Story,” and Jim was fortunate to be offered a role. Despite the broken partnership with Carden & Cherry, Disney saw Jim’s potential for playing something besides Ernest. A few years prior, Disney had been working with Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker to develop a live-action movie version of his famous comic-strip character. The two sides had come close to working out a deal until Walker balked at Disney’s insistence on Jim playing Beetle. Walker appeared to be one more in a growing list of people who could not envision Jim playing anything other than an Ernest-type character. But with “Toy Story,” Disney (and perhaps Pixar, too) showed they felt otherwise and wanted him to voice the character of Slinky Dog. “Toy Story” was for Pixar what “Ernest Goes to Camp” had been for Carden & Cherry. Little did Jim, or anyone else, know just how successful “Toy Story” would become, or what kind of impact it would have on animation.
Jim spent the next two years making numerous trips from his home in Tennessee to Pixar’s Bay Area studios to record dialogue for Slinky Dog. He described the process as one of the oddest in his film experience, much like putting a large puzzle together. Animators used the mannerisms of each actor to give each toy more human qualities. One coincidence was that at the time, Jim’s mother owned a miniature dachshund named Gretchen that looked identical to Slinky Dog.
In a sense, voicing Slinky Dog brought Jim’s career full circle. He had started out doing voice work on radio ads for John Cherry in the early ‘70s. Jim’s voice was now in the hands of animators translating it into the personality of the character. Decades of smoking had given Jim’s voice a deep, raspy sound that provided well-worn Southern warmth to the coil-bellied dog.
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But despite Jim’s happiness at being part of “Toy Story,” tragedy was on the scene for him again. In August 1994, Jim’s mother lost a seven-year battle with leukemia. Jim was able to visit her in the hospital in Lexington in the days before she died. At 45, he had now lost both parents and his oldest sister.
Work, as always, was a salve to Jim’s grief. He continued to stay busy by returning to Vancouver once again to shoot another Ernest film. It seemed fitting that being from Kentucky, Jim would someday portray a basketball star. In “Slam Dunk Ernest,” Ernest is a mall janitor trying to fit in with his basketball-playing co-workers. Things begin to look up when he is asked to join their city-league team.
Ernest soon receives a big helping hand when the Archangel of Basketball, played by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, pays Ernest a visit and bestows upon him magical sneakers. Soon Ernest has the ability to perform gravity-defying moves on and off the court. John Cherry provides his own comic relief with a cameo portraying a fan in the stands who creates a minor brawl over a spilled drink.
Ernest’s moves eventually propel his team to capture the city-league title, earning them a chance to play against an actual NBA team. In addition to all the usual slapstick silliness, Cherry included a morality subplot as he had done with previous movies such as “Camp” and “Christmas.” Ernest teaches the impressionable young son of one of his co-workers that there is more to life than a pair of new basketball sneakers. Although “Slam Dunk” went straight to video, it still satisfied hard-core Ernest fans.
Apart from “Toy Story,” few of Jim’s ne
xt movies gave him the momentum he had built up from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The next non-Ernest movie in which Jim was cast was “The Expert,” an action flick filmed in Nashville. Action star and martial artist Jeff Speakman stars as a man out to avenge his sister’s murder. Jim plays the role of his longtime friend, a weapons expert named Snake.
Prolific crime author Max Allan Collins wrote the film’s screenplay. His resume includes everything from comic strips to short stories. In 1998, he wrote the graphic novel “Road to Perdition,” which was made into the 2002 film by the same name starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. When speaking of the role of the sadistic warden played by James Brolin in “The Expert,” Collins said he had originally written it with Rip Torn in mind. After seeing Jim audition for the role, Collins changed his mind. “I lobbied for him,” Collins once said, “and when he didn’t get the part, I wrote a new scene, a new character (Snake), especially for him, as a cameo.”
One highlight in the short list of Jim’s mostly forgettable non-Ernest films of the mid ‘90s brought him back to Lexington; “100 Proof” is based on the true story of two troubled women who together committed five murders in a single day in Lexington, Ky. First-time movie director Jeremy Horton used the 1986 murders as the inspiration for his fictionalized screenplay. He had become interested in the story after moving into an apartment building where one of the convicted murderers, Tina Hickey Powell, once lived. It wasn’t so much the crime that intrigued Horton but the thought of what possibly could have led two people to go on such a rampage.
Once Horton had the financing in place, he began casting. He could rely on talented local theater actors he knew for many of the roles but had specific people in mind for central characters. (One wasn’t an actor at all. Horton had convinced one of his idols, Southern novelist Larry Brown, to play a drug-dealing storeowner.)
Horton tried to get such accomplished actors as Harry Dean Stanton, M. Emmett Walsh and Dennis Hopper for the part of Rae’s father (Rae is one of the two main female characters). When efforts fell through, Jim’s name came to his mind.
Horton had met Jim years earlier when Jim attended a stage production he had directed for the Studio Players in Lexington. Remembering how highly the Lexington theater community had spoken of Jim’s acting, Horton contacted Jim’s management and soon found out that Jim was interested. Even though Jim’s character would appear in only one scene, those moments would play a large part in exposing the unrelenting despair that penetrated Rae’s life.
In October 1995, shooting started at some of the less-appealing locales in Lexington in order to portray the gritty setting. Horton recalls Jim being the consummate professional. Jim made sure that his performance captured the rhythm Horton intended. At one point, Horton left Jim and actor Pamela Stewart, who plays Rae, alone for about an hour to work on their scene. He says the two even came up with a back story for their father/daughter relationship to help them get more into the heads of their characters. Jim also helped choreograph the brief physical confrontation that takes place between them.
After finishing up work on “100 Proof,” Jim continued accepting roles in non-Ernest films. In February 1996, he traveled to Quebec to shoot a comedy called “Snowboard Academy.” The movie stars Cory Haim and Brigitte Nielsen. Former SCTV regular Joe Flaherty plays the owner of a ski resort whose two sons try to convince their father how to run the family business. At the time, snowboarding was still building its popularity. The movie does address in a comedic way the problem of snowboarders wanting to ride the ski slopes. Jim plays the part of Rudy James, a jack-of-all-trades maintenance man. Jim pulled from his real-life comedy-club experiences in scenes where Rudy performs stand-up at the resort’s clubhouse. Even though Jim isn’t playing Ernest, his character displays many of the same slapstick antics. In Rudy’s first scene, he gets tangled up in a phone cord, then attempts to use his hands to contain the flowing hot coffee from a malfunctioning coffee maker. Unfortunately, the movie flopped, even inhabiting for many years the “Bottom 100” list on the Internet Movie Database.
As busy as Jim was accepting film roles for non-Ernest characters, he was still shooting commercials as everyone’s favorite neighbor for clients such as Louisiana Gas Service. Jim told one Canadian reporter during this period that he planned to continue playing Ernest “until I’m on crutches or too old to actually fall off a ladder.”
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Jim’s next project was set for the spring. It was another independent film that, like “100 Proof,” was far removed from Ernest and comedies altogether. The title, “Blood, Friends, and Money” involves a group of horror-movie buffs who gather one weekend to party and watch horror flicks. The film was the project of longtime Ernest assistant camera operator, Armanda Costanza. She had worked on every movie project of Jim’s, from “Family Album” to “Scared Stupid.” She was now trying her own hand at directing and hoped the film would be successful enough to fund future projects. Jim played the Old Mariner in a few scenes.
The script was written by Tim Ormond, whose family has sometimes been referred to as Nashville’s first family of film. Ormond’s parents (Ron and June Carr Ormond) had been making independent, B-movie exploitation films in Nashville since the 1960s. Some of the clips from those films were even used in Costanza’s picture. Tim’s mother, June Carr Ormond, was cast as a restaurant manager. Since Jim and the Ormond family had become synonymous with film making in Nashville, it was fitting that they shared credits on a project.
Around this time, Jim was branching out into computer-software games. In the past, he had always talked about wanting to write stories in the spirit of the original English and Appalachian tales that center around a character named Jack – “Jack and the Beanstalk” being the most popular of these “jack tales.” Jim never got around to writing any of his own jack tales, but he did become involved in the production of a computer game for kids called “Jack’s Adventures: Beyond the Beanstalk.” Despite all the work Jim put into it, the game was never released.
In the fall of 1996, Jim was on location in Denver for the children’s comedy, “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.” Jim was cast as Lothar Zogg, his first villain since playing Ernest’s evil twin in “Ernest Goes to Jail.” The film, starring Hulk Hogan as a retired TV action star turned superhero, failed at the box office. Like “Snowboard Academy,” it made the Internet Movie Database’s “Bottom 100.”
But during this time, Jim did shine in a small-screen hit. He guest-starred on two episodes of “Roseanne,” playing Prince Carlos of Moldavia. The storyline involves Roseanne’s sister, Jackie, falling for his character after he visits the diner where she and Roseanne work. The two enjoy a short-lived romance that includes a trip to New York and an eclectic family gathering at Roseanne’s house.
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More good fortune fell upon Jim when “100 Proof” was selected for the Sundance Film Festival in January 1997. Director Jeremy Horton had hoped that Jim would attend and join other cast members in promoting the film. Despite all the obvious reasons for Jim to want to be there, including a chance to rub elbows with Hollywood executives, he decided to participate in the Buckmasters Whitetail Classic with his friends in Alabama. As committed as Jim was to selling hundreds of products as Ernest, he wasn’t always as dedicated when it came to selling himself. He lost a major opportunity to capitalize on his small but memorable performance in “100 Proof” and his ability to truly play dramatic roles.
After its screening at Sundance, “100 Proof” went on to receive positive reviews in such publications as the New York Times. Joe Leydon of Variety wrote, “But even Stewart and Bellando are briefly overshadowed by Jim Varney’s ferociously nasty cameo as Rae’s sleazy father. It’s hard to believe this is the same guy who’s gained fame as the doltish Ernest P. Worrell in TV commercials and low-budget comedies. More villainous character roles may be in his future.”
The film’s producer, George Maranville, told the press how pleased he was with
Horton’s directing efforts, comparing the film to others in the same genre such as “Badlands” and “In Cold Blood.”
In January 1998, the movie was given a special premiere at the historic Kentucky Theatre in downtown Lexington. Jim traveled to Lexington to join his family in attending the event. Although his family had always enjoyed Ernest as much as Jim’s biggest fans, they were excited about Jim taking on the type of role he had wanted for so long.
But apart from “100 Proof,” few of the movies Jim starred in after “Hillbillies” brought box-office or critical success. That’s in large part why he returned once again to making movies as Ernest. A few years earlier when promoting “Rides Again,” Jim speculated on how many years of Ernest he might have left. “I’m gonna let it kinda die a natural death, I think,” he said. The fact that the movies were now going straight to video reflected that Ernest was already living on borrowed time.
The next two Ernest movies took the film crew all the way to South Africa. The first, “Ernest Goes to Africa,” involves Ernest making a long-distance trip to rescue a kidnapped girlfriend to whom he unknowingly has given stolen diamonds.
The second film, “Ernest in the Army,” was shot in Cape Town. It would be the ninth and final Ernest movie. In addition to directing, John Cherry plays the part of Ernest’s old friend, Sarge, who talks Ernest into joining the Army Reserves. After being promised that the Reserves would be easy, Ernest is shipped out for combat, and calamity ensues. During the shoot, Cherry noticed how his normally energetic star was having a particularly difficult time handling some of the hilly terrain. At the time, no one was aware of the extent to which Jim’s health had begun to deteriorate.